Three former Apple executives, who are part of the team that created the processor found in the iPhone, iPad and soon to be MacBook, have managed to raise $240 million with a startup called Nuvia. The small processor company hopes to replicate the same success in the data center, using the ethos that drove the team to create what is arguably the world's most powerful family of mobile processors. Based on Arm technology, the new chip is expected to challenge the more traditional players in the data center field, some of which are also Arm-based (for example, Ampere Altra / Marvel Thunder), as well such as AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon.
Bride
According to Reuters, the funding round was led by Mithril Capital, which has very close ties to Facebook, one of the world's largest users of data center processors. Just a few days ago, Arm announced two new processor models, Neoverse V1 and Neoverse N2, which aim to deliver better performance per thread than the competition. However, after Arm was acquired by Nvidia for €40 billion, Nuvia's CEO confirmed that the company is evaluating other options as an alternative to Arm IP. RISC-V, for example, has been gaining momentum since it became open source, with support from Facebook, Google, and IBM.
Apple connection
The Apple-Nuvia thread, however, cannot be skipped; Apple acquired three different silicon companies (Passive, Intrisity, and PA Semi) to build the A-series processor. There's no reason it wouldn't buy a fourth to help produce the kind of server processors that, like the Graviton from Amazon, are ideal for Apple's needs, especially since its launch. of the new Apple One subscription service. We know that Apple has probably doubled its data center investments, despite a record drop in CAPEX spending, and that the company may be interested in launching a search engine and privacy services , including a VPN. The company also operates a cloud storage service, and we wouldn't be surprised if it launched a host of new offerings, such as a website builder.